September 30, 2016

Judge Me Not, AI

A: I would hope that they do so for the same reasons I would do so as a professional with over 25 years of building data-driven business systems. People simply do not want to be judged by machines.

The slightly longer answer is that most people are aware of paradoxes that a bit of discussion and negotiation can resolve. Computer systems are not capable of ex-post facto discussion and negotiation. Once you have decided to trust data out of a computer, you are stuck. In a few limited domains, this is acceptable, but not in most.There are all sorts of movies that dramatize this. I would challenge anyone to get through one season’s episodes of Law & Order and try to apply data-driven decision making to the scenarios presented.

In politics, opposition to Obamacare was posed in the rhetoric of ‘death panels’. Imagine, if you will, that healthcare in your city were managed by a emergency room triage system rather than by humans. Whom would you trust to program such a system that makes you wait for treatment? I could develop a system that takes all of the data known to insurance companies and give you a health profile. I could take your SAT score, your caloric input, your FICO score, your body mass index and your driving record (for examples) and assign you a new number which is averaged against everyone in the US. How much of what people think of you would you like to have invested in this one number?

think many Americans in particular and Westerners in general have forgotten something about the literature that reminded us of the alienation of modern culture. Everybody who wears a tattoo in defiance of conformity implicitly understands something about this alienation, but tattoos and ‘tattoo culutre’ are commodified as well. We all recognize ‘hipsters’ as people who try to escape the mainstream, and yet even hipsters are cliche. There will always be a human need to be recognized by society in more dimensions than computers will ever capture. I’m bringing in the angle of literature, art and society as a counterpoint to that which is digitized and digitizable. It’s not about exactly how many basketballs Michael Jordan put through the hoop, it’s not the data about Michael Jordan. It’s about Michael Jordan.

In the end, every one of us has an ego that is screaming “Don’t you know who I am?”. Who we are will not be found in the data. Why we did it will not be found in the data. Sure, decide the MTBF of my car’s crankshaft with your IoT storm, but judge me on my character.

Comments

A: I would hope that they do so for the same reasons I would do so as a professional with over 25 years of building data-driven business systems. People simply do not want to be judged by machines.

The slightly longer answer is that most people are aware of paradoxes that a bit of discussion and negotiation can resolve. Computer systems are not capable of ex-post facto discussion and negotiation. Once you have decided to trust data out of a computer, you are stuck. In a few limited domains, this is acceptable, but not in most.There are all sorts of movies that dramatize this. I would challenge anyone to get through one season’s episodes of Law & Order and try to apply data-driven decision making to the scenarios presented.

In politics, opposition to Obamacare was posed in the rhetoric of ‘death panels’. Imagine, if you will, that healthcare in your city were managed by a emergency room triage system rather than by humans. Whom would you trust to program such a system that makes you wait for treatment? I could develop a system that takes all of the data known to insurance companies and give you a health profile. I could take your SAT score, your caloric input, your FICO score, your body mass index and your driving record (for examples) and assign you a new number which is averaged against everyone in the US. How much of what people think of you would you like to have invested in this one number?

think many Americans in particular and Westerners in general have forgotten something about the literature that reminded us of the alienation of modern culture. Everybody who wears a tattoo in defiance of conformity implicitly understands something about this alienation, but tattoos and ‘tattoo culutre’ are commodified as well. We all recognize ‘hipsters’ as people who try to escape the mainstream, and yet even hipsters are cliche. There will always be a human need to be recognized by society in more dimensions than computers will ever capture. I’m bringing in the angle of literature, art and society as a counterpoint to that which is digitized and digitizable. It’s not about exactly how many basketballs Michael Jordan put through the hoop, it’s not the data about Michael Jordan. It’s about Michael Jordan.

In the end, every one of us has an ego that is screaming “Don’t you know who I am?”. Who we are will not be found in the data. Why we did it will not be found in the data. Sure, decide the MTBF of my car’s crankshaft with your IoT storm, but judge me on my character.